Richard Ling

Danielle Herro

Chris Holden

Sousan Arafeh

There can be no doubt that mobile technologies are here to stay. Global mobile traffic grew 74 percent in 2015 alone, with 563 million devices and connections added -- most of them tablets and Smartphones. This growth has been 4000-fold in the past 10 years and 400 million-fold in the past 15 years (Cisco, 2016). Mobile technologies permeate the lives of 21st century citizens as mainstays of organizational and institutional day-to-day operations, commerce, and communication and as tools used to support individuals’ personal, social, and career responsibilities. In both the corporate and educational worlds, e- and m-learning and marketing with mobile technologies are moving forward at breakneck speed with, in many cases, a blurring of traditional sector boundaries. As neither the technology nor the uses are static, exploring practices and policies that underpin this quickly shifting mobile technology context is crucial for ensuring its intelligent, purposeful, and equitable use. This edited book provides a venue for researchers to share their work on mobile learning with a focus on uses for mobiles in informal settings and PK-20 classrooms, language learning, mobile gaming, leadership and policy issues, and what mobile learning in the future may be. It assists researchers and educators to consider and answer questions such as: What is “mobile learning” today? How can mobiles be used to enable learning? How is mobile learning crossing or connecting economic, social, and/or cultural sectors? How do specific cultural practices with media influence mobile learning (e.g., youth practices, educator practices, parent practices, community practices)? What are policy and leadership implications in supporting mobile learning? What policies, practices, and/or pedagogical approaches are necessary to move forward with mobiles in schools or universities? In what ways is mobile learning impacting education; including how students learn and teachers teach? What will/ should/might mobile learning look like in the future?

Perspectives on Practice and Policy

Mobile Learning

An examination of how the mobile phone has become part of the fabric of society—as did such earlier technologies as the clock and the car. Why do we feel insulted or exasperated when our friends and family don't answer their mobile phones? If the Internet has allowed us to broaden our social world into a virtual friend-net, the mobile phone is an instrument of a more intimate social sphere. The mobile phone provides a taken-for-granted link to the people to whom we are closest; when we are without it, social and domestic disarray may result. In just a few years, the mobile phone has become central to the functioning of society. In this book, Rich Ling explores the process by which the mobile phone has become embedded in society, comparing it to earlier technologies that changed the character of our social interaction and, along the way, became taken for granted. Ling, drawing on research, interviews, and quantitative material, shows how the mobile phone (and the clock and the automobile before it) can be regarded as a social mediation technology, with a critical mass of users, a supporting ideology, changes in the social ecology, and a web of mutual expectations regarding use. By examining the similarities and synergies among these three technologies, Ling sheds a more general light on how technical systems become embedded in society and how they support social interaction within the closest sphere of friends and family.

Richard Ling

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